Bruner and My Blog

BrunerJerome Bruner, a cognitive psychologist, considered major significant developmental factors in the cognitive growth of children. His findings were that intellectual growth:

Is directly related to gaining independent responses from stimuli

Depends on an internal information process and storage system – use a symbol system including
language to predict and hypothesise

Involves the ability to describe past and future actions

Needs systematic interactions with teachers/tutors to sustain cognitive development

Needs the use of language to converse ideas and problems with others and to link to the familiar (Marsh, 2004 pp. 23 - 24)http://www.infed.org/thinkers/bruner.htmThis link explains key points about Bruner’s life and his educational theory.Bruner, based on his studies, developed three stages of cognitive growth.
These are:
· The Enactive Stage: o Learning by doing – holding, moving, touching, which provides children
with a necessary understanding of their environment

· The Iconic Stage:o Involves imagery but not language, ability to recognize instances of
something without being able to give an account of the concept

· The Symbolic Stage:o The final stage where children understand through symbols – language, logic and mathematics. In this stage the child learns how to store the information for later use. (Marsh, 2004 pp. 24)

Bruner’s work will be beneficial to my teaching as these stages coincide with other cognitive theorists such as Piaget and Vygotsky. Although as with the other theories, you cannot assume that the students will fit right into the category. A way I will try and get around it will be to include aspects of all three stages to hopefully cover a broad range of learning styles that will be in my classroom.

New Blog
Bruner is a cognitive psychologist. We have learnt through this unit that online learning and ICT are definately good cognitive tools for learning. I believe that my blog is also a cognitive learning tool as the information i have written could be interpreted in any way. If students were to look at my blog, i could post a whole section that has facts and pictures on it for them to learn about. But each student would learn this in a different way. Through Bruners stages of development, we can see that a child will learn by looking at symbols and logically working through problems. I believe that my blog offers aspects for tehse cognitive traits to develop.